Surely it's time to focus on-field - minus the tiring referee bashing

After an off-season that was the branding equivalent of being duct-taped to a chair and having a confession beaten out of you with a tyre iron by The Punisher, the NRL hopes its on-field product will be a sea of relative calm and – dare we suggest – common sense in 2019.

The game finds itself in a position where the football can’t start soon enough. We’ve all seen this movie before, but this time Todd Greenberg must have a timer on his Fitbit ticking down towards Melbourne and Brisbane’s season-opener on March 14.

Grey area: The NRL has sought to simplify controversial rulings such as the shoulder charge.Credit:AAP

From that point, fans can start to obsess about something other than off-field atrocities and turn the blowtorch on the usual suspects when it comes to the more regulation baddies of the Greatest Game of All: Referees.

Or will they? Maybe things will be different this year. Actually, it has to be, for everyone’s mental health. The game’s on-field officials found themselves at the centre of a weekly crisis at the start of 2018 as they tried to execute a crackdown on a range of infringements that had crept back into the game.

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The result was contests with massive penalty counts as teams learned exceedingly slowly that they had to do things like attempt to make it look like you tried just a bit to put your foot on the ball when you roll it backwards after a tackle. Heads were being called for and the narrative became infuriating for almost everyone in and around the game until the shackles were relaxed midway through the season, teams picked up the slack and referees were allowed to use some of the discretion and judgment that had them doing the job in the first place.

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If the plan comes together under new head of football Graham Annesley, that should be the mantra from the opening round. Referees have been told to rule on what’s in front of them, not on higher orders, and new rules should be able to help them in their duties.

Sometimes, it’s just the little things. Players must now head for the nearest exit, running not walking, if they are given 10 minutes to think about life in the sin bin. Previously, you could have made a cup of tea and been back on the couch by the time they had left the field of play.

And under the changes released just before Christmas, tackles that look and smell like a shoulder charge – yet somehow aren’t a shoulder charge – can be categorised as 'dangerous contact', a move sparked by the Billy Slater charge that almost saw him miss the grand final.

Slater was able to beat the shoulder charge allegation on a technicality but it was peak NRL as half the sporting nation tuned in for the verdict. But with an either/or scenario as their only option, the NRL wasn’t able to prove that Slater’s contact on Sharks winger Sosaia Feki fit the strict definition of a shoulder charge.

Now, the game has the ability to recategorise such tackles as 'dangerous contact', which would only carry a 100-point grading, unlike a shoulder charge which always starts with a 200-point base penalty.

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It gives everyone some wiggle room. If a player had no loading, they could enter an early plea and be free to play. In Slater’s case, it would have avoided the hugely dramatic judiciary hearing just a few days before he was to play his final game of rugby league.

It all smacks of that rare commodity that is common sense, although if any sport can find a way to make things unwieldy and obtuse, it’s rugby league. At the very least, some of the new tools and interpretations may help reduce the caustic, concerted and ridiculous verbal assaults that referees had to endure for much of last season.

Rugby league has endured through difficult times in Australia because the game tends to be its own salvation, delivering entertainment and exhilaration often in spite of itself. Let 2019 be the year where we can appreciate the skill and talent without the superfluous lashings of confected outrage.